CBN pensioners urge Emefelie to reverse 15 % slash

Central Bank of Nigeria’s (CBN) pensioners have urged the Governor, Godwin Emefelie, to reverse the 15 per cent reduction in their monthly pensions.

They said the arbitrary deduction applied to 1,604 of them that retired before June 1, 2000, urging that Emefiele should restore their pension to what it was from July 2011 to February this year.

They have therefore called for a refund of the total deductions.

“With your expected gracious intervention, we are hopeful that we are going to start receiving our normal pension as from the end of this month – July 2014, or perhaps, not later than from August this year,” they said.

In a statement by the Concerned CBN Pensioners, signed by Wale Adebayo and Felix Obi, the former workers explained that on February 26 this year, over 1,600 of them received alerts from their bankers notifying them the slash.

The statement read: “Initially, we thought it was a mistake that would be corrected the next month or shortly thereafter. But when we enquired from some top officers of the CBN in Abuja about the reason for this unprecedented, arbitrary and ill-advised action, we were surprisingly told that CBN had to slash our pensions because we were being overpaid since July 2011.

“The truth is that there was no mistake in the calculation of the pension we have been receiving as from July 2011 to January 2014 (33 months). Rather, the slash was done in bad faith.

“It was clearly a punitive, vindictive and illegal action calculated to intimidate and arm twist us into abandoning our legitimate right of seeking redress in court for the enforcement of court orders in respect of the long-lingering issue of an all-inclusive (for all the 5,000 CBN pensioners) and full harmonisation of pension for those pensioners whose pensions were slightly enhanced in July 2011, which we stoutly resist.”